Vodafone partners with Facebook to launch its ‘Facebook Phone’ in India

Vodafone is all set to bring its Vodafone 555 Blue phone to India, according to the website CrazyEngineers. Featuring a dedicated button to access the world’s most popular social networking website, the Facebook Phone is expected to be cheaply priced when it goes on sale.

First, the raw specs: it has a 2.4-inch QVGA display (no touchscreen) with a resolution of 320×240 pixels and a full QWERTY keypad. It has the standard connectivity options like Bluetooth, GPRS and EDGE, but it does not do 3G and is not a smartphone. It also has a 2-megapixel camera with a flash, an FM radio and a 3.5mm headphone jack. And the haloed Facebook button, of course.

The phone will ask for your Facebook logic credentials upon first boot and offer to help you set up an account if you don’t have one already (for all we know, maybe you have just been born—we’re not going to judge). The impending launch has not been officially announced yet, so the price is an unknown quantity for now. Gartner principal research analyst Vishal Tripathi figures that it will cost about ₹ 5,000 ($110) though, so it should have mass-market appeal.

The phone’s only real competition in the country is HTC’s ChaCha phone, but it retails at ₹ 16,000, so Vodafone should have quite an edge on pricing. Furthermore, Vodafone will probably offer cheaper data plans specifically for its Facebook Phone, so that will be a major incentive for buyers to side with Vodafone’s offering.

We’ll see how it all pans out once the phone is released, but with 33 million users in India and growing, it sure looks good for both Facebook and Vodafone’s prospects.